National Improve Your Office Day

To celebrate National Improve Your Office Day, here at Search Office Space we caught up with our friends at Paramount Interiors to look at how your office space can be designed to reflect your company, help your employees work better and make the workplace a comfortable and creatively-stimulating environment. Read more below!

“You can have a national day for pretty much anything these days, September alone allows you to celebrate talking like a pirate (September 19th), hugging a vegetarian (September 26th) and raising awareness of iguanas (September 8th). There is, however, a date in October that is at least of some benefit to businesses across the globe; October the 4th is National Improve Your Office Day. It’s also Taco Day and Vodka Day, but we don’t particularly advise combining them all.

We asked Helen Bartlett, Design Manager at office design and fit-out specialists Paramount Interiors, to give us her top tips on how to improve your workplace when it comes to the next office fit-out.

Whether you’re about to change the entire layout of your office or just freshen up the furniture, a few small changes could make all the difference and improve the way that people feel about coming to work.

Choose your culture

You’ll know what the culture of your business is, but is that represented in the design of your office?

Creativity

If your staff need a space to get creative, fill it with things to spark that creativity. Maybe a pinball machine or a giant game of jenga? You could go the same route as Go Compare and have a different theme for each meeting room, theirs include an indoor/outdoor room and a 70s retro lounge. In Paramount’s own ShowOffice, we covered one of our walls with erasable whiteboard paint so that staff can jot down their notes during meetings.

Collaboration

If you want to encourage collaboration, create a mixture of both informal and formal spaces so that people can choose which is most relevant for them. Comfy breakout zones will encourage socialising and ‘chance encounters’, which very often will result in a more productive meeting than a more formal meeting room. But sometimes you will need a room with a door for personal one-to-one sessions.

Concentration

If an open plan layout seems like it doesn’t lend itself to giving staff areas for quiet concentration there are a number of acoustic dampening products, like portable screens and small pods, which can create noise-free pockets in the office space. You could go one step further and create a Multi Media Pod like the one at Life Sciences Hub Wales, which is an enclosed pod that comes with its own interactive media screen table top!

National Improve Your Office Day will remind people about the importance of office design, but it’s worth looking at it on a regular basis to see if the space you work in really does represent your business and makes your working day as pleasant as possible.”

We love Helen’s recommendations for how to improve your office, from full fit-outs to just the decorative accessories. Providing a fun, inclusive and practical layout in the workplace is becoming an essential criterion, as opposed to a nice-to-have, for employees, as it has been proven to encouraging better engagement, improve productivity and create better morale.

Are you planning to improve your office soon? What will you be implementing and why? Tell us in a comment below or share your pictures with us on Twitter!